Hermaphroditism, Medical Science and Sexual Identity in Spain, 1850–1960

By Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García

This is the first book in English to analyse the medical category of ‘hermaphroditism’ in Spain over the period 1850-1960. It attempts to show how the relationship between the male and female body, biological ‘sex’, gender and sexuality constantly changed in the light of emerging medical, legal and social influences. Tracing the evolution of the hermaphrodite from its association with the ‘marvellous’ to the association with intersexuality and transexuality, this book emphasizes how the frameworks employed by scientists and doctors reflected not only changing international paradigms with respect to ‘hermaphrodite science’ but also social anxieties about shifting gender roles, the evolving discourse on sexuality and, in particular, the increased visibility of the ‘sexual deviancies’ such as homosexuality and changing legislation on marriage and divorce. Finally, we hope to open a space whereby the voice of ‘hermaphrodites’ and ‘intersexuals’ themselves could be heard in the past as agents in the construction of their own destiny as figures deemed ‘in-between’ by medicine and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2009
• ISBN: 9781783163793

Richard Cleminson

Dr. Cleminson is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Leeds. He has previously published books in both English and Spanish for Spanish and UK publishers including Huerga and Fierro and Peter Lang. Prof. Vazquez Garcia is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cadiz. He has published widely for various Spanish publishers and university presses.

Book preview

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Hermaphroditism, Medical Science and

Sexual Identity in Spain, 1850–1960

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (Swansea University)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of Nottingham)

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Hermaphroditism,

Medical Science and

Sexual Identity in Spain,

1850–1960

Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2009

© Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2204-8

e-ISBN 978-1-7831-6379-3

The rights of Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Image of a ‘gynaecomast’ taken from Angel Pulido, ‘La lactancia paterna. IV’, Revista de Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas, VI (1880), 367. Courtesy of the library of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Cadiz.

Contents

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Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction: Male, Female or In-Between? Towards a History of the Science of ‘Hermaphroditism’ in Spain, 1850–1960

Chapter 2: From Sex as Social Status to Biological Sex

Chapter 3: Between Diagnoses: Hermaphroditism, Hypospadias and Pseudo-hermaphroditism, 1870–1905

Chapter 4: Gonads, Hormones and Marañón’s Theory of Intersexuality, 1905–1930

Chapter 5: From True Sex to Sex as Simulacrum

Chapter 6: Conclusions

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

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Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superceded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds -categories which extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies which explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research on the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies which explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

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Richard Cleminson would like to acknowledge the intellectual stimulus freely given by Rosa Maria Medina Doménech, with whom the ideas that became this book were originally discussed, the searching questions posed at the Hispanic Studies seminar at the University of Cambridge, the interest with which some aspects of this project were received at a conference on the body and sexuality at the University of Exeter and the various conversations with Lena Eckert, Jennifer Jordan, Lesley Hall, Chris Perriam, Lola Sánchez and Alison Sinclair. He would like to thank the staff of many libraries, including those working in Document Supply at the University of Leeds, at the University of Granada and the University of Oviedo, the staff at the Covadonga hospital library, Oviedo, the Wellcome Library, London, especially Venita Paul, and the library of the Hospital San Juan de Dios, Granada, especially Gustavo Zenner. In particular, like Francisco Vázquez, he would like to thank Ana Remón, the director of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Cadiz library. Part of the funding for completing this research came from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Research Leave scheme. Without this funding, the completion of this project would have taken much longer, if achieved at all. Some of the initial research was undertaken while in receipt of a Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Award for a previous project on male homosexuality in Spain. Final thanks go to Fredy Vélez for unfailing support, wine and dinners and company on the way.

Francisco Vázquez would like to acknowledge the assistance of many individuals who have sought out and made available rich materials in order to complete this book. These include: Chema Fraile, María Jesús Ruiz, Arturo Morgado and José María López Cepero. I thank the historians María José de la Pascua, Mónica Bolufer and Andrés Moreno Mengíbar for what their writings have taught me and for their helpful comments. Particular thanks go to the director of the library of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cadiz, Ana Remón. My colleagues in philosophy have provided an ideal place in which to enjoy an excellent and pleasant environment to work. I would also like to thank the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Leeds University, the research group ‘Ubi Sunt’, Rafael Vélez and Francisco Ortega Guerrero, who invited me to talk about some of the ideas contained in this book, as well as the students for the Master’s degree in Gender and Citizenship at the University of Cadiz for their suggestions and interest. Finally, thanks go to Oliva and Curro for their generosity and constant support.

Both authors would like to thank Sarah Lewis, Elin Nesta Lewis and Siân Chapman of the University of Wales Press for their work, encouragement and patience over the course of this project.

Note: The numerous minor errors of Spanish in the original texts have been left uncorrected. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are our own.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Male, Female or In-Between? Towards a History of the Science of ‘Hermaphroditism’ in Spain, 1850–1960

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Methodological and theoretical considerations

At least since Ovid’s account in book 4 of his Metamorphoses, in which the gods Mercury and Venus, embodiments of ideal manhood and womanhood respectively, had a son named Hermaphroditus, hermaphroditism, or the apparent mixing of the sexes, has been a subject of fascination for the West.¹ Hermaphroditus was, like his parents Hermes and Aphrodite in their Greek incarnations, a perfect example of humankind. His exemplary male physique, however, was to be transformed during his encounter with the nymph Salmacis who requested that the gods unite her forever to the boy. Hermaphroditus’ encounter with Salmacis resulted in Hermaphrodite, a body with double sex or ‘in-between’, ‘weakened’ status, an ‘androgyne son’.² After his transformation, Hermaphrodite requested that any future male who passed by the nymph’s pool where he was changed should likewise emerge with his ‘manhood diminished’.³ Such a story fired the western literary and medical imagination both for its attractiveness – the harmonious combination of two ‘opposites’ in one body⁴ – and for its marvellous but unsettling nature – the mixing of the two sexes which might signify great good or evil to come, a dual perception that has continued to inform historical accounts of hermaphrodites and the related fields of androgyny, intersexuality and transsexualism to this day.⁵

Examples of ‘hermaphrodites’ have recurred in different countries over time. Principally, they have been the focus of attention of the religious authorities and the medical and legal professions, which viewed the hermaphrodite as a disruption of what might now be termed accepted gendered and sexual norms. Examples of this disruption and the ways in which such figures were dealt with by the authorities include the case of Marie/Germain Gamier discussed by the French royal surgeon Ambroise Paré in 1573,⁶ the case of Helena de Céspedes heard by the Toledo Offices of the Inquisition in 1587,⁷ and the nineteenth-century French Herculine Barbin, all discussed below.⁸

What was at stake for these medical and/or religious authorities was the construction of an account that satisfactorily aligned body gender and sex into what was for them a harmonious whole, eliminating or explaining the ‘abnormal’.⁹ This was not, however, a static process. Changing medical diagnoses and social expectations with regard to the sexes meant a constant rewriting of the interrelationship between the body, conceptions of the sex of the individual and of what we now term gender and sexual preference as a means of situating bodies that did not fall clearly into the male/ female divide. These changing conceptualizations beg a number of questions: what were the criteria according to which the identification of the sex of the person was made? Why was it necessary to determine the ‘true’ sex of the individual whose masculinity or femininity was in doubt? To what degree did the changing contested social positions of the sexes, in the context of new marriage legislation, for example, affect doctors’ discussions of the ‘real sex’ of the individual? How did the concerns of new nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal philosophies and regimes influence medical perceptions of sex?¹⁰

This book will focus primarily on medico-legal discourse on the hermaphrodite in Spain and will argue that the ‘science of hermaphroditism’, emerging from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, was an attempt by medical and legal authorities to manage a cluster of ‘deviant’ representations and acts around body, sex and gender in social and medical circumstances that changed over time.¹¹ This science-in-construction must be considered as part of other emerging sexual sciences of the period, particularly the inquiries into homosexuality and other forms of gendered and sexual ‘deviance’.¹² As is the case for homosexuality, the science of hermaphroditism underwent numerous changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book sets out to chart and explain them.

Historians generally agree that changes in the conceptualization of the hermaphrodite have passed through the following broad stages from the medieval period: a contested but generally hegemonic acceptance of the hermaphrodite as a kind of intermediary between male and female emerging out of concurrent but conflicting accounts stemming from the thought of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen, amongst others, on the generation of humans and animals up to the early sixteenth century; a period of ‘disenchantment’ when the hermaphrodite’s marvellous nature and actual possibility were steadily rejected; and his/her medicalization and ultimate practical impossibility by the end of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century doctors faced with cases of ambiguous sex argued that hermaphrodites did not in fact exist among human beings save in extremely rare cases and that individuals of doubtful sex were in reality apparent, not real hermaphrodites.

Accompanying this process of the elimination of the possibility of the real physical hermaphrodite was the concomitant and parallel emergence of a different and new sexual figure. After his/her many transformations over time, from the mid-nineteenth century the hermaphrodite took two principal routes: first, the anatomical hermaphrodite, who was gradually given less and less discursive space, and, secondly, the so-called ‘psychic hermaphrodite’, the category that was to become the ‘homosexual’.¹³ The two were never far apart, however, and hermaphroditism remained as a ‘ghost category’ in the construction of sexual inversion and homosexuality, sometimes coming more to the fore and on occasion shrinking into the background.¹⁴

Such an outline of the genealogy of the hermaphrodite does entail certain problems of interpretation. Rather than trace an apparently continuous and coherent line between documented historical cases of supposed hermaphroditism from the sixteenth century onwards and those persons deemed ‘intersexuals’ in the period studied in this book, we need to be aware that ‘hermaphrodites’ in the past may have not displayed the same characteristics as those that we discuss here. The very diagnostics of the category and the category itself have changed. The term ‘intersexual’ did not exist until the early twentieth century and ‘transsexualism’ as a ‘condition’ where sex change was sought was first elaborated in 1949; neither meant the same as the ‘hermaphrodite’ of yesteryear.¹⁵ On the one hand, therefore, it is necessary to avoid the culturally conditioned assumptions adopted by some writers who study the hermaphrodite, the androgyne or the intersexual as an unproblem-atic continual presence in history or in societies outside of the west, imbuing him or her with particular qualities and with connections to a supposed transnational hermaphrodite identity.¹⁶ On the other hand, we are conscious that, precisely because similar terminology has been used to designate people of an intersexual condition, we cannot erase any kind of continuity between seemingly disparate examples. The question is therefore posed: how do we write historically about ‘hermaphrodites’?

In what follows we propose a four-part discussion as a prelude to our analysis of the hermaphrodite in Spain in the period 1850–1960. First, we review a number of historians’ accounts of hermaphroditism in history. In this section, the legacy of material on the subject from the medieval period, the relative importance of Hippocratic and Aristotelian perspectives on hermaphroditism, Foucault’s writing on hermaphroditism and Thomas Laqueur’s work on changes in western understandings of the differences between male and female are key subjects. Secondly, we discuss some theoretical debates within feminist studies with respect to the relationship between the body, gender and sex. This analysis complements particularly Foucault’s analysis of hermaphroditism by introducing an account of notions of biological ‘sex’ from a feminist perspective that deconstructs concepts of nature and nurture, the fixity or otherwise of sex and their relationship to gender and the body. Thirdly, we outline a possible framework for the consideration of hermaphroditism in Spain by drawing on the work of Alice Dreger and Nelly Oudshoorn with respect to the stages of medical development of hermaphroditism and the establishment of endocrinology and hormonal analysis.¹⁷ Finally, we dedicate a section to the state of current historical debates in Spain on the figure of the hermaphrodite and with special reference to our period, 1850–1960. The first three sections are meant as debates; rather than adopting one approach we will consider our subject from a variety of standpoints as we progress.

Hermaphroditism and intersexuality: historical perspectives

Western thought on the subject of hermaphroditism stems largely from Graeco-Roman treatment of hermaphroditism and the natural scientific work of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen on the generation of human beings and the fixing of sex in medieval medical thought.¹⁸ While the influence of these sources on medieval and later medical thought is extensive it is clear that many basic concepts from this time survived into the modern period; it is not a case of an abrupt change being effected in studies of hermaphroditism come the nineteenth century but rather one of uneven development with regional idiosyncrasies.¹⁹

In first-century BCE Greece there were two principal competing theories on the generation of human beings, each providing a more medicalized rather than a mythological interpretation of the ancient Graeco-Roman myths such as that of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis or the interpretation of love and sex advanced by Plato.²⁰ The first of these theories was articulated by Hippocrates (c.460–375 BCE), who believed that human beings were not divided into two sexes, but that there existed one sex, the male sex, with derivations of varying perfection from this model. The most perfect representation was the virile male and the most imperfect the completely feminine female. In between these poles there existed, according to the physician, a whole range of intermediate figures and sexual transmutations, including menstruating males, bearded women, viragos, effeminates and different types of hermaphrodite. Hippocrates believed that the sex of the foetus was determined by two opposites: the maternal and paternal principles that each produced their kind of seed. In accordance with the position of the foetus in the womb, which was divided into different ‘chambers’, and with the relative domination of male or female seed, the new-born child would either be male or female or somewhere in between. If the foetus was located in the centre of the womb and received equal doses of male and female principles it would be truly hermaphroditic.²¹

Thomas Laqueur has argued that this Hippocratic model dominated western notions of the generation of the sexes and, by connection, of hermaphrodites until the eighteenth century. This ‘one-sex’ model, whereby the fully virile male represented perfection and all other derivations were deemed less perfect, was one where society would still speak of men and women but instead of major differences between them in terms of biology, what counted essentially were differences in terms of the social role of men and women. This ‘one-sex’ model would give way to a ‘two-sex’ model in the eighteenth century, in which males and females were seen as different sexes in themselves as part of an Enlightenment project which deemed females equal but different in social and biological terms and which underpinned the separation of the public and private spheres as part of western democracy.²² This acceptance of fundamental differences between the sexes was in part a response to medical developments but was also due to broad changes in the social world resulting in clearer roles for gendered behaviour. Women came to be associated fundamentally with their ‘sexual nature’ and would be dedicated to childbearing and nurturing while the male would transcend his sexual nature,²³ although ‘sexually deviant’ males would be excepted from this model of self-control.

Other historians, however, have questioned Laqueur’s account. Joan Cadden has argued not for the dominance of one theory of generation (Hippocrates’) overanotherin medieval times (eleventh-fourteenth centuries) but in favour of a wide variety of views on the generation of the sexes.²⁴ Daston and Park note that the tradition of theories of generation was ‘more complicated and internally diverse’ than Laqueur’s depiction. They point to our second theory on the generation of animals and sex: that of Aristotle.²⁵ Aristotle (384–322 BCE), author of De Generatione Animalium, argued in favour of a dichotomous nature of the sexes, not a continuum or a scale from full male perfection to female imperfection.²⁶ In the same way as other Aristotelian polarities such as active/passive, perfect/ imperfect and matter/form were held to exist, Aristotle did not admit intermediate or transitory stages between the sexes. For this reason, Aristotle believed that real hermaphrodites did not in fact exist. Declaring in addition that female seed did not exist, in contrast to Hippocrates’ understanding, any individual not easily classified as male or female would result when the amount of matter contributed by the mother was excessive for the growth of just one fully formed foetus. ‘Hermaphroditism’, then, was no more than a question of ‘extra sex (genital) parts added on to their single true sexes’.²⁷ In this model, hermaphroditism was therefore like ‘extra toes or nipples, in that it represented an overabundance of generative material’,²⁸ a kind of deformation but not an intermediate sex.

Such a view was largely accepted, despite a number of modifications, by the physician Galen (131–201 CE). Galen relied on Aristotle’s writings in order to establish his own theories on the generation of human beings. The physician agreed with Hippocratic sources that women were moister than men but accepted, following Aristotle, that women were cooler and men warmer. Even though Galen disagreed with Aristotle, however, on the question of seed (Galen followed Hippocrates on the ‘two-seed’ model rather than Aristotle’s acceptance of male seed only), he did adopt the polarity of left and right shared by both Aristotle and Hippocrates and he employed the traditional association of right with male and left with female. Further, in an additional twist and in contrast to Aristotle, he did not use this device to emphasize any differences between the sexes but argued, this time following Aristotle, that females were less perfect than males because they were less warm. Aristotle used the female lack of heat as an explanation of female inability to produce semen, thus reasserting the contrary nature of the sexes and underscoring the value of social and sexual hierarchy. Galen, on the other hand, took the Hippocratic position, arguing that females did produce semen but that it was less plentiful and was cooler and moister than males’. Finally, male and female parts were anatomically equivalent for Galen but viewed through an internal/external prism, that is, what the male possessed externally, the female held internally.²⁹

How did these various competing or complementary theories affect notions of hermaphroditism in the West in the ensuing centuries? Over a period of a thousand years, ‘these two contrasting, ancient accounts of hermaphroditism were transmitted to medieval and early modern medical theorists in a number of stages, both directly – as various of the key texts were successively translated from Greek into Latin – and indirectly, through the intermediary of Arabic writers such as Avicenna’, Daston and Park argue.³⁰ The result of this eclectic mix was a complex and uneasy juxtaposition or fusion of theoretical positions with the Hippocratic model dominating until the early middle ages. With the Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century, however, these theories gradually assumed dominance but did not shed all their Hippocratic and Galenic elements.³¹ By the later thirteenth century the simple incompatibilities between the two sets of theories had ‘become blurred and complicated by a welter of distinctions and mutual accommodations’.³² The result was to compromise Aristotle’s notion of the impossibility of hermaphrodites and tacitly to admit their existence, but associating them henceforth with sexual duplicity or deviance,³³ a category less associated with anatomical difference and more closely attuned to sexual or gender deviance.

There was increased interest in hermaphroditism, to judge by the number of books published on the subject, from the early sixteenth century onwards. This was partly as a result of scientific developments in understanding nature and partly as a result of social changes altering perceptions of the ‘proper’ place of men and women.³⁴ Daston and Park argue that ‘The range and intensity of this medical interest in the topic was distinctly new – in contrast to the relatively brief and general references in earlier treatises – as was the urgency of the moral and social concerns that they expressed.’³⁵ From the late sixteenth century, however, with a Hippocratic revival in full swing, medical texts began to associate hermaphroditism with sexually, morally and theologically charged issues of sodomy, transvestism and sexual transformation in a context where male power was being challenged.³⁶ The late sixteenth-century On Monsters and Prodigies by Ambroise Paré considered hermaphroditism alongside a number of ‘monstrous’ births and the book discussed several cases in which women changed into men. Daston and Park again: ‘Rather than invoking Aristotelian considerations of excess maternal matter, only partially mastered by the paternal seed, [Paré] offers a frankly Hippocratic explanation’, whereby the woman provided as much seed as the man with the result that two sexes may be found in the same body.³⁷

Despite the title of Paré’s work, a naturalist explanation of the genesis of the hermaphrodite was offered. Foucault and other historians have argued that from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the association between the hermaphrodite and the marvellous or monstrous began to decline as increasingly anatomical and biological accounts gained sway. Changes in the sex of individuals were deemed unlikely or impossible – any apparent change in sex was merely the coming to the fore of existing sexual characteristics. As the acceptance of the marvellous and monstrous declined so did the possibility of the real hermaphrodite.³⁸ Thus doctors who wrote about anatomy, such as the French anatomist Jean Riolan, began to argue in the early seventeenth century that the hermaphrodite did not – could not- really exist.³⁹ While this change in thought took some time and we should exercise caution in taking an isolated case or even a cluster of cases to presuppose the acceptance of a completely new paradigm, we can say that by the early nineteenth century old understandings of the hermaphrodite as a marvellous being or even as a natural possibility had well and truly faded.⁴⁰

While this ongoing process eliminated the hermaphrodite as a category, remnants of this thought remained in scientists’ interpretations of both the human and animal world throughout the period we study here. In nineteenth-century medical treatises much reference was made to Darwin’s thought on the evolution of animals and plants with respect to the sexes and reproduction. Darwin was to write in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), that ‘in many, probably in all cases, the secondary characters of each sex lie dormant or latent in the opposite sex, ready to be evolved under peculiar circumstances’.⁴¹ Such a theory of Original bisexu-ality’, whereby beings combined elements of the two sexes, one of which dominated the other before birth, would resurface, in, for example, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (1903). Weininger, like the Spanish scientist Gregorio Marañón later, held that the characteristics of the other sex never truly or completely disappear and that they ‘persist without exception’.⁴²

While some, such as Paul Julius Möbius, understood sexually intermediate categories to be the result of degeneracy,⁴³ others understood ‘bisexuality’ to be natural. In Marañón’s scheme, ‘inter-sexuals’ were those in whom the triumph of maleness or femaleness had not been sufficiently complete to entail proper ‘sexual differentiation’.⁴⁴ Darwinian theories were also employed by psychiatrists such as the American James Kiernan who in 1884 understood homosexuality to be an atavism, a throw-back to lower evolutionary forms.⁴⁵ Physicians such as the Frenchman Julien Chevalier interpreted homosexuality as a faulty evolutionary development in 1893.⁴⁶ The British sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis cited a number of authorities such as Darwin, Haeckel and Kiernan to argue in his Sexual Inversion (1897) that homosexuality was a form of hermaphroditism, that is, a reversion to the primitive ancestral phase when bisexuality was the norm.⁴⁷ Eventually, however, the notion that hermaphroditism was the basis from which animal life sprang was slowly eliminated in the face of sexual dimorphism from the embryonic stage. Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) posited that while the progenitor of the vertebrate kingdom was androgynous, sex differences had come about in response to changing environmental conditions, which in turn impacted on evolution in tandem with natural selection in the form of sexual selection.⁴⁸

Feminist epistemologies of the body: towards critical notions of gender, sex and the body

In 1903, Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character, asked himself and his readers the following question: ‘where is sex situated and where is it not?’⁴⁹ His inquiry arose from his own interest in determining where masculinity and femininity ‘express themselves’, having made it clear that ‘sexuality’ (by which he understood maleness and femaleness) was not restricted merely to the reproductive organs and the ‘sex glands’ or gonads. Doctors who investigated cases of supposed hermaphroditism also asked themselves precisely where sex was located, in the body (and, if so, where exactly) or in the mind?

At least since Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society (1972) and Gayle Rubin’s analysis of what she termed the ‘sex/gender’ system (1975),⁵⁰ feminist thinkers have understood that the body is not separate from sex, that sex is not separate from gender and that these categories are products of historical human activity rather than ‘real’ in any transhistorical sense. While these accounts have often seen gender as a socially constructed set of signifiers and behaviours that become attached to the sexes, they have tended, at least until recently, to view the sex of the person as something intrinsic and biologically grounded. Gender, as a set of cultural practices, was understood to spring from the sex of the body within certain social circumstances.

Recent feminist authors, however, coincide in the need to revise some of the claims of 1970s feminism with respect to the body, sex and gender, to reassess the question of biology in action in society and the issue of how science and society construct nature and nurture. Nelly Oudshoorn discusses how during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, male and female bodies were viewed from a perspective that rejected biological determinism (the position that posits essential differences between men and women in terms of bodies, hormones and psyches and believes that gendered social practices arise from an intrinsic sex-differentiated biological basis), focusing on the social as providing the constraints on (particularly) women’s behaviour and abilities.⁵¹ But feminism at this time did not enter into a critique of the notion of the ‘natural body’ or into an analysis of the power of the bio-medical sciences to proclaim truths about the body. Feminism, including the pioneering work of Ann Oakley mentioned above, focused instead on the social, following the argument held by Simone de Beauvoir that women are made and not born. This meant that many feminists accepted the distinction between innate biological sex differences and gender attributes acquired by socialization. Such a move effectively allowed feminism to regard the social as its point of research and debate, leaving the biological untouched as a category of reality outside of the social. As Oudshoorn states: ‘ [T]he concept of sex maintained its status as an ahistorical attribute of the human body and the body remained excluded from feminist analysis.’⁵²

There has, however, since the mid-1980s been a steady revision of the relationship between the social and biological sciences, of the concepts of nature/nurture and of the biological body.⁵³ Not least, this entailed a revision in feminist thought of the idea that sex and biology in themselves are fixed categories.⁵⁴ From a feminist perspective, such reassessments have resulted in considerable shifts in this area of thought. Schiebinger, for example, now notes that feminism has argued that gender differences are not fixed in the character of the species but ‘arise from specific histories and from specific divisions of labour and power between the sexes’.⁵⁵ While feminists, Schiebinger continues, have opposed the argument from ‘nature’ with one from ‘nurture’ since the seventeenth century, recently two caveats have arisen: first, too strict a demarcation between nature and nurture can obscure how ‘nurture’ (culture) can form ‘nature’ (the body). Second, having accepted a strict division between nature and nurture feminists allowed a certain constructivism to prevail that tended to dissolve all body differences into political and cultural artefacts. Recent developments in medicine have shown how nature too needs to taken seriously with respect to women’s health issues, for example.⁵⁶

While the biology of the body, the constructions of nature and nurture and the materiality of the body have all recently come under scrutiny, some feminist biologists are curious that it is still mainly only the surface of the body that has received social analysis. Although the body’s outside appearance can be adorned or physically altered to fit with changing cultural mores, for Birke ‘the renewed focus seems always to end at the body’s surface’.⁵⁷ Birke argues for a more profound social theory: ‘While recent sociological and feminist theory has made enormously important claims about the processes of cultural inscription on the body, and about the cultural representation of the body, the body that appears in this new theory seems to be disembodied – or at the very least disembowelled. Theory it seems, is only skin deep.’⁵⁸ Birke proposes a look inside the body to see how assumptions about gender ‘are read onto nature, including the insides of our bodies’.⁵⁹

Judith Butler, for her part, critiques the feminist distinction between gender and sex as she understands this dualism